Pam Schweitzer, MBE, Reminiscence Expert & Coordinator of the European Reminiscence Network

One of the leading experts in the field of reminiscence therapy for over 30 years, Pam Schweitzer MBE is passionate about the positive effects of this work on older people and those with dementia – focusing on triggering individual memories and the sharing of stories in reminiscence groups. We talk to her about breaking down the boundaries between history and memory, the increasing recognition of the importance of reminiscence work and the power of stories as the fabric of our lives – both personally and in the social record.

How did you first become involved in reminiscence therapy?

I was working in education bringing young and old together through educational projects and encountered a group of older people telling stories and sharing their experiences.

I saw what it did for them physiologically, emotionally and psychologically – the process of remembering in a group and triggering one another’s memories had a dramatic effect on how they looked, sounded and felt.

There was a brightening of the face and body, increased confidence and engagement with other people in the room and a real sense of community, having remembered common experiences.

Listening to those stories, and with my background in theatre and drama, I felt that they would lend themselves to dramatisation, so I formed a theatre company, Age Exchange Theatre Trust, to create plays based on these memories and tour them nationally.

Most of the performances we did were for older people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to come, in sheltered housing, community centres and even hospitals. The focus was to stimulate their memories through reminiscence therapy, so that after the performance there could be further reminiscence work to support those communities.

Reminiscence theatre work was my baby for 30 years – and within that, there were other activities. For example, the publishing side of my work developed naturally because the stories we collected for the shows were so interesting that we didn’t want them to die with the performance.

So I made books of the memories and photographs and those went out with the shows. It also gradually became clear that the venues we were playing wanted training and support in reminiscence work and we were able to set that up.

How important is it to tell stories between generations?

There is always an intergenerational aspect to oral history in that you’re preserving the past and the present, for the future. The stories we generated when researching the major productions on big topics involving social history in the UK have a life after the initial production and tour.

For example, I started interviewing people in 1982/1983 and those people were in their eighties and nineties then. Had those memories not been captured, they would have been lost knowledge and experience.

I also made a point of targeting people to interview who would never have committed their memories to writing – people for whom writing wasn’t something they did or was perhaps even an impossibility. I was looking for something more spontaneous as a story that would lend itself to dialogue in theatre form.

Implicit in storytelling is the notion that this story will reach others, and people tell stories because it gives them a greater sense of their reality and participation in history. I am currently working at the University of Greenwich, with students who are using the memories collected all those years ago as inspiration for new work, now.

I am not interested in oral history that just locks up memory; I am interested in it as a story and as a repository for future work. I’m committed to breaking down disciplinary boundaries between history, theatre and memory.

By situating the questions in a creative reminiscence session dedicated to a particular subject or life period, they will respond and remember many things – and that process is a very positive one, it changes people’s’ sense of self and self-esteem.

You can also find that someone you think is apparently no longer able to contribute is actually able to say, or show, quite a lot about school days or falling in love etc. This stops people with dementia being written-off as unreachable and brings them into both a social and a personal relationship.

How did you expand your reminiscence work internationally?

My international work developed in response to growing numbers of older people in the demographic, and the sense within Europe that more had to be done for them to preserve their social identity.

There was an already a European Reminiscence Network, which I founded in 1992, and which had undertaken a range of projects, primarily arts-based and often around ethnic minorities’ experience (of migration for example) in different EU countries.

In the late 1990s, though, the idea came about that we should look at dementia because it was a growing phenomenon. We had been advised by the European Commission, that this needed to be addressed and started from the premise that we wanted to test whether reminiscence has a particular value in the care of people with dementia. This value certainly wasn’t obvious at the time, especially because dementia is to do with memory failure, so why would you want to work with memory?

My intention was to use reminiscence as a tool for self-expression, communication, sense of personhood and reduction of social isolation, so we did a series of projects around that.

The European Reminiscence Network expanded its partnership for this particular project. We evolved a programme – ‘Remember Yesterday, Caring Today Training’ (RYCTT), held a common training programme and developed a series of reminiscence workshops and groups (RYCT) – which we held in common, pooled our information and reported back to to the European Commission in our own countries.

How useful is reminiscence work for those living with dementia?

When I am working with dementia, the emphasis is not so much on the accuracy of the memory; it’s what remembering your own past does to your sense of self and in the mind and heart of the person looking after you – usually a spouse or son/daughter.

Reminiscence is something in which, with the right triggers, people with dementia can participate in successfully. When stimulated by songs of a particular time – dances, clothing, objects, etc., they can share many things about their life, which if you asked them in the form of straight questions, they probably wouldn’t be able to answer.

By situating the questions in a creative reminiscence session dedicated to a particular subject or life period, they will respond and remember many things – and that process is a very positive one, it changes people’s’ sense of self and self-esteem.

You can also find that someone you think is no longer able to contribute is actually able to say, or show, quite a lot about school days or falling in love etc. This stops people with dementia being written-off as unreachable and brings them into both a social and a personal relationship.